If I Was A Rich Man

Summertime, and the living is easy. You would think that I'd be happy. Here I sit in my leafy suburb, making big bucks writing the occasional column for The Courant -- and basking in all the afterglow of having my photo in the Oldest Newspaper of Continuous Publication Lucky Enough to Have a Cohen Column. The money, the women, the liquor, the hot Buick Park Avenue, the expense account at the State Capitol cafeteria. You would think that I've got it all. Ha. I'm tense. I rarely have time to sing in the rain or play in the park or go see the Hartford Symphony Orchestra perform at the local high school auditorium. Friends? Ha. You've got friends. I've got a few acquaintances who are as busy and neurotic as I am. And have I told you that I'm tense? I'm so distracted that I didn't even know how miserable I am, until I read an article about myself in the June 30 issue of Science magazine. There I was, in the company of all the other rich people, studied and evaluated and correlated and calibrated by a Princeton University economist, who determined that rich people are more tense than not-so-rich people; that rich people are only the tiniest bit more happy than everyone else; and that rich people don't really spend any more time having fun than those of you who have to save up during the week so that you can afford to buy The Courant on Fridays and read the Cohen column. This doesn't seem fair. Here I sit, agonizing over every word, so that The Courant will shower me with gold coins -- and only now do I learn that you're all out there having fun, in a not-very-tense, happy place with all your good friends and stuff. What the Hindus call the ``calculus of bliss'' has lost a decimal point. I should be the happy one, sitting here cooing over my municipal bonds and big cigars. I can sense that some of you are smirking at the rich guy. You still think it's better to be rich, but you're sort of glad that I'm tense and miserable and friendless. Well, just you wait, Mr. and Mrs. Smarty Pants. There's a move afoot to drag me down to your level. Democratic gubernatorial hopeful John DeStefano wants to ``tax the millionaires,'' in large part to pay for a freeze on property taxes for senior citizens; or health insurance for all; or to pay for banners across Main Street welcoming the Socialist Revolution. If DeStefano actually becomes governor, and all of us millionaires get taxed even more hideously than we already are, we would soon be just as poor as the rest of you -- and then we would be happy and less tense, with lots of new friends. Do you religious folks think that Cohen the Rich Man has about as much chance of getting into heaven as a camel has of passing through the eye of a needle? Well, just you wait until DeStefano thins me down. I'll glide through the needle like an elephant that hasn't eaten since the Democrats last elected a governor in Connecticut. And once I get there, I'll start charging admission. I'm entrepreneurial. That's what makes us rich folks rich. In the journal Independent Review a few years back, Frederick Turner, a University of Texas professor, suggested that efforts to make rich people less rich, or less venal, or more compassionate, are doomed to fail. Turner suggested that the best approach isn't to make rich people less rich but to make everyone rich -- and thus, one supposes, equally miserable and lonely and friendless. Poor people oppress people who are poorer than they are, Turner points out; it's all a matter of human nature. ``The answer,'' he wrote, ``is not to take revenge on the rich or to make everybody poor for spite, but to make sure there are no poor people for rich people to oppress -- that is, to make everybody rich.'' So, a University of Texas professor has suggested that I make all of you rich, at which point a Princeton University professor can declare all of you friendless and miserable and tense. I'm going out for a big, expensive lunch to think it over. By myself. Because I have no friends.